Hands-on with the entire new Apple Mac M1 lineup
Hands-on with the entire new Apple Mac M1 lineup
9:02

Hands-on with the entire new Apple Mac M1 lineup

Laptops
I've got my hands at all three of the new M1 powered Max. The MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro, and the Mac mini. I'm going to tell you whether not you should be an early adopter. The big news is that Apple is switching all of their Max from Intel chip to their own Apple Silicon chips, otherwise known as am one. It's the biggest platform change for Max since they switched from power PC chips to Intel chips way back in 2006, and those were. Among the very first laptop I ever reviewed for CNET, which means I've been doing this a long time. So now I've got you see the very first Intel Macs, and I've also apparently seen the very last Intel Macs because I now have the first versions of the Apple M1 Max. I've got a new M1 MacBook Air, a new M1 MacBook Pro, and the new M1 Mac Mini, and these range of price from 699 to the Mini. The air is as usual still 999 and the Pro is 1299. Now that really interesting thing here is that all three of those Apple devices have Essentia Lee. The same M1 chip it up. It's not like you're buying an air and getting a core I3 and buying a pro and getting a Core i5. They've all got the one version of the M1. The only real difference is the base model, MacBook Air that 999 MacBook Air. It's got 7 GPU courses that have a GPU cores, although they don't have the eight CPU cores. And what I did some benchmark testing on. All three of these systems and compare them to previous Intel Macs. The three new an one versions, all performed roughly the same, and they all performed much better than the older Intel versions, even though I was testing Intel Mac books from just earlier in 2020, not really very old ones at all. Now, this could come in handy if you're doing a lot of video editing or highend- photo editing, or try to do 3D creation on your Mac. You say. Of course, I want more power for the same money. That makes perfect sense to me now the downside is. Every you switch platforms like this, all the software that people run under Intel or AMD powered laptops, whether their Windows or Mac ones, the architecture for the M1 chip is closer to arm based. Things like you find in a lot of tablets and phones, Anna Handful of Windows laptops, ARM based Windows laptops, which frankly so far have not particularly impressed Maine, and there were lots compatibility issues. A lot of apps that you use just wouldn't work. Now for the Apple version with M1. They've taken a lot of care. First of all, performance is very good. Secondly, battery life is fantastic. We're really seeing some great battery life gains. In fact, Apple says you should get like 18 hours of video playback from the air in 20 hours from the pro. In my video streaming test, which is a little tougher than apples, I got 16 hours and 41 minutes out of the air. I'm still testing the pro, but that's a really good improvement, especially for people who feel like they don't want to have to carry around their power cable with him all the time. It's kind of like a phone or an iPad. You charge it up, you leave it there in charge, and then once you pick it up, you don't take the charger with you. It should be good all day, and these Max are finally ones that give you that sense. Now, depending on what software you're using, you're either going to get an M1 native version of that software, Apple calls it a universal app so it will work on any Mac equally well, and there's only a handful of those native for M1 software programs right now. A lot of them are apples own programs, a few of them like Microsoft Office and Davinci Resolve, which is a video editing program. They were in beta right now, but you can get the beta versions if you look around. Other apps are going to have to. Run through what's called Rosetta Rosetta to the original. Rosetta was for that power PC to Intel translation, so Rosetta basically takes the program you're running, emulates it as if it were running on Intel chips instead of the M1 chip, and when I installed some Photoshop and Illustrator, another Adobe apps on these systems, I'd get the pop up message saying, hey, we're going to use Rosetta to run this. Hope that's cool, and then I would get a separate warning message from Adobe saying you're still using the Intel based version of this while we work. On the Apple M1 native version now the M1 native version of Light Room, a popular Adobe app, is coming in December. The M1 versions of like Photoshop and Illustrator Premiere. They're not coming till next year, and that's probably the single biggest concern I have about these new M1 Max, because those are such mission critical apps for so many people I would have kidnapped a bunch of Adobe engineers and lock him in the basement over at the Apple Spaceship campus to make sure that I had Photoshop. Running natively on day one. That said, I was able to run these apps on these new M1 systems and they ran about as well as they do on the Intel versions, but not necessarily better. One area where they did run better is when I try the M1 native version of Davinci Resolve, which again is admitting reading program not want. I usually use, but I played around with it, but I put some 4K clips that I had shot for a previous review of the Xbox Series X in an. I just did a bunch of quick cuts and throw in a whole bunch of goofy transitions just to see what would happen when you try to preview it in real time. On an old Intel Mac book, air in really stuttered it couldn't. It couldn't preview it in 4K. For me, it couldn't really preview with that well, and even 1084 main. And that's what I would expect from a Mac book air on the M1 versions on the Mac Mini and on the Mac book Air. It could mostly do the 4K preview version they got caught up in a couple of the more intensive transitions when I switch to previewing it in 1080, then it ran super smooth. So I'm very pleased in the video editing process so far an what these new M1 versions can do versus the. The video editing performance you get on frankly very consumer system like an Intel Mac book Air previously. So Apple is making a lot of promises about these M1 systems that there faster. I find that that is generally true so far in my early benchmark handson- testing, I've only had these for a couple of days. They talk a little bit about gaming. I have not been successful getting a lot of games to run yet. Hopefully more and more gains will work, either with Rosetta or become native Apple Silicon apps, and they made big claims about battery life, which again in my testing so far I have found to be true. Now you don't always want to be in early adopter, especially if you're doing mission critical creative pro stuff like photo and video editing and 3D where the apps you need. You're going to have to run in an emulated mode, or wait for the real versions. I might hang off a little bit on that if you were about to buy a Mac book air anyway, because you need the machine to carry around that will last all day and do all that stuff on MacBook Air does really well like using online tools and email and social media and streaming video and just being your all day everyday regular. Regular guy or gal laptop. Well this new M1 version seems to do all that very well. An runs for a lot longer per charge and even better. Its now famous which is something really the air should have been for a long time. That means that its power efficient enough that it could just use an aluminum heat spreader inside. It. Doesn't need a separate fan to keep it cool, even though it's the same M1 chip for the most part in the MacBook Pro an the Mac Mini you can conceivably get longer sustained peak power out of those because they have active cooling systems in them, by which I mean they have a fan. So that's the one thing to keep in mind. Differentiating these two systems of these, the 999 MacBook Air feels like a better deal right now than the 1299 MacBook Pro, because frankly, they're pretty identical. They both have almost the same M1 chip. They both have just 8 gigs of RAM and a 256 gig hard drive, so maybe I would get the air and spend a couple 100$ upgrading the RAM and the hard drive space rather than spending more in the prove to start where you do get a slightly brighter screen, you get active cooling it. You have to touch bar if you're a touch bar fan, and I'm sure they are out there. But maybe the best value overall is that not many. It's 699, so it remains the least expensive way to get into Mac OS and its performance was the same in some cases. Even a little bit better than the Mac book Pro, which costs almost twice as much. Of course, we are continuing to test all these new Max. The M1 Mac Mini, the M1 MacBook Air and the M1 MacBook Pro an we're going to report back to you when we got new battery life scores, new benchmark scores, and new app compatibility issues to talk about. That's it.

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